Saturday, December 16, 2006

Inbox Serendipity

I spend much time deleting unsollicited mail from my inboxes (and I know I am not alone). Mostly various filters simplify my task but sorting what comes toward my inbox, either by recognizing mail I expect or by casting aside mail it suspects to be spam. Because programmed logic has its limits, the messages cast aside are not immediately deleted, but kept for me to browse before ultimately deleting; if the filter mistakes a legitimate message for spam I can recover it and "teach" the filter. Parts of this process could be more efficient, but I like having the last word, and scrolling through the suspects to see if there were any innocent victims. And I am amused when I find a few gems and curiosities such as:

selectbs.com : perhaps they chose this domain name because they wanted one short and easy to remember; perhaps "bs" is a good abreviation for "business solutions".

"Subject: defecate" . Of course.

Subject: Though I swore I leaped from the." No apparent commercial content, just this (little poem?)

To me religious else does err.

That I am father to then. Yarn good andill together our.

Knowledge he is and lousy.

"Subject: Notice" A public service message without commercial content or links:

Please adopt a pet from your local shelterinstead of buying one from a pet store.There are many great pets waiting for a homebut 80% end up being put to sleep becauseso many people end up buying pets thatcome from puppy mills where the animalsare tortured, forced to bread 24/7.Google: Puppy Mills and you will understant better.Help stop puppy mills by putting themout of business and help stop thousands of animalsfrom being put to sleep every day and adopt a beautifulfriend from your local shelter today. Just 1 adoption by youwill make 100% difference in the life of that pet.

Not as innocent as it seems, however; it meant to advertise a "stock tip" but made a formatting error in its MIME content-type declarations so the tip fails to display.

"Subject: rigor mortis consultant", "From: outboard motor". How could I not wonder what this was pushing? And how could I be surprised and disappointed that it was just another tip to "make fast money."

The spam filters are not 100% effective, but some are getting pretty good. For instance, one of my mail accounts I just checked had put about 250 messages into a "spam folder" and only let about three get by into my inbox. Soon after they began this filtering, I came across an advertisement that they themselves had sent me and then set aside as suspicious; I had to smile, and (slightly viciously) did not press the "is not spam" button. I found another of their ads suspected of being spam since then, but mostly they make it to the inbox.

The down side of the work flow as they have organized it is that I must twice delete all the spam it has correctly identified, with lots of clicking and waiting, as I have complained before. It would be more sensible to be able to scroll through the accused messages, salvage any wrongly accused, then purge all in one or two clicks.

About Me

Why uwwoonp.?

In response to criticism for ending a sentence with a preposition (the part of speech), Winston Churchill replied "This is the sort of pedantry up with which I cannot put." I think there are plenty of things Up With Which One Ought Not Put, and maybe pointing some of them out will help (or at least make me feel better).